Off-highway vehicles are becoming more and more sophisticated. Many off-highway vehicles are equipped with sensors and/or cameras that are useful in assisting the operator of the vehicle with the vehicle's operation. In some instances, the operator of the vehicle may be an onboard human operator, an onboard vehicle controller, an off-board human operator or off-board computer controller. Many these off-highway vehicles may be used as part of a system comprising several off-highway vehicles.
Examples of such systems may be found in the mining industry. Mobile machines or vehicles, such as haul trucks and other types of heavy equipment, are often used to haul material from a load location at which the material is loaded into the machines, to a dump location at which the material is discharged from the machines. In order to maintain productivity and efficiency at a worksite while accomplishing predetermined cycles, travel of machines to and from at the dump and loading locations and positioning of the discharge and loading material should be carefully managed. A need to properly manage vehicles and/or machines at the worksite can be even more important when machines or vehicles are working on high wall operations and are autonomously controlled.
To assist in controlling various machines and/or vehicles, various sensors including cameras are used. Due to dirt, debris, dust or other contaminates, the cameras and/or sensors can degrade in performance. In order to restore the performance of the sensors and/or cameras sensor washing systems are used. The sensor washing systems currently known may be activated by a user or automatically activated based on the expiration of a set time period. Other controllers for sensor cleaning systems may rely on various settings on the machine such as which gear the transmission is in, detecting that an IG switch is turned to an off position or when an image from a camera contains dirt. Such a system is described in US published patent application number US 2012/0117745. However, these control systems do not account for other factors which may play an important part in a determination of whether or not to subject a sensor to a cleaning operation.